Once Upon a Time in Saillune
by Ryo Hoshi
Summary: [Dark, postNEXT] After Amelia and Zelgadiss vanish while investigating the mystery of Rose Castle, Lina and Gourry go to investigate the castle themselves.
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

Long ago, the youngest of seven Saillunese princes had a small castle built for himself, his wife, and their young son in the most isolated area of the kingdom and named it Rose.  
It was a lovely castle, palace-like in many ways; the stonework was exquisitely carved, the floors were wonderfully laid tile or marble, the walls and ceiling were painted with the utmost care. But the best feature was the stained glass windows, which were featured prominently throughout the entire estate. The family of the Prince's wife were known as the best stained glass window makers in the kingdom and they had worked hard to produce the best windows imaginable.  
They moved into their new home on Midsummer Day, with the minimum of servants in accompaniment.  
By the dawn of the next Midsummer Day, the castle lay empty. The prince and his wife had vanished, and all but one servant were dead; the surviving servant, a young girl who was working as a nursemaid, had fled with the baby.  
The nursemaid told a horrifying tale of nightmares, deaths, and mysterious disappearances... 

**Once Upon a Time in Saillune  
A dark Slayers tale by Ryo Hoshi**


	2. Part 1: Set Adrift on a Nightmare Sea

...and here's the opening block of nonsensical scribbles...  
The Slayers & the characters from it were created by Hajime Kanzaka and Rui Araizumi. I'm unsure of the full list of who owns parts of the rights to it.  
But I'm not on that list.  
This is not being written for profit (not that I even think I could sell it) and you folks already got my money. I'm broke, y'hear? 

The usual C&C welcome, encouragement wanted, flames C&C'd, ect and so forth my am I used to saying this stuff goes here. 

This is dark. This shall get repeated on a regular basis just in case anybody even suspects that I am kidding. 

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Lina and Gourry walked towards the gates of the Palace.  
"Do you think Amelia'll recognize us?" Gourry asked.  
"Of course she will," Lina said. "It's not like we've changed that much in the last year."  
Gourry's forehead wrinkled as his mind ground through the most basic of calculations. A few minutes later, the telephone-and-finger-counting system delivered an answer. "It's been over a year since we last saw Amelia," Gourry said.  
Lina hit him. "It's close enough." Lina was starting to get slightly annoyed with Gourry; she had lately started wondering if Gourry had just been playing stupid before. (Unknown to Lina, the rather disturbing shard of something she had removed from Gourry's head while healing a comparatively less disturbing-looking dent in Gourry's head -- courtesy of a rather obvious but annoyingly well-placed booby-trap that had been set by some bandits which Lina had triggered -- had been greatly contributing to Gourry's mental deficiencies. But that's another story.)  
The time since they had last seen the others had been quiet for the pair. It had been yet another round of the usual bandit-killing and generalized, random, and specialized destruction that Lina Inverse specialized in. There had been no misplaced Dark Lords, no powerful magical objects, no mazoku (aside from a few possible Xelloss sightings), and Lina was starting to feel slightly paranoid.  
So, she decided, she'd see if she could find the others and get it over with. 

Lina's eye twitched. The palace guard to whom she had been talking to started sweating. "I'm telling you the truth! Princess Amelia isn't here! Ask the Crown Prince!"  
"Okay," Lina said with a sweet smile that only made the guard more nervous, "Where is Phil?"  
"He's in his study!" The guard quickly moved to the side and pointed in the general direction of Prince Phil's study. "Don't hurt me!" he added.  
Lina grinned and started walking towards the study, Gourry on her heels; she hadn't needed the rough direction the guard had provided, as she remembered the way to the study from the last time she had been there. 

Lina and Gourry stood at the doors to Prince Philionel's study. As they stood there, wondering what had caused the muffled yell only a few minutes ago, the door swung open and a harassed-looking messenger quickly left. Lina looked at Gourry, shrugged, and they went in, Gourry swinging shut the door left open by the departing messenger.  
Prince Phil was sitting behind his desk, his head in his hands. Lina cleared her throat, sensing that this was a time not to be loud and cheerful. "Phil? Where's Amelia? We asked the guards about her, but they didn't say much..."  
He said, simply, "My daughter's vanished."  
"What?" Lina said, disbelieving. This was just too surreal for her.  
Prince Philionel took a deep breath. "Amelia, my daughter, has vanished." He looked at Lina, trying to read her face. "She and Zelgadiss-san vanished last week from Rose Castle."  
Lina blinked. Castle? What castle...oh, she thought, he must mean the castle in that legend Amelia told us about before she and Zel left. "So, they did investigate that castle."  
"Zelgadiss-san asked permission to investigate the abandoned castle near the village of Rose. Amelia went to represent the Saillune royal family." Prince Phil lifted his head from his hands. "The messenger who just left was from Rose. A week ago, one of the people from Clearwater Farm went there to deliver supplies and found the place deserted..."  
"Oh no..." Lina could only guess how this was affecting the prince. Lina herself found this hard to believe. She had known Zel and Amelia. They had been good -- not as good as her own self, of course, but good enough that they wouldn't just vanish. Whatever -- whomever -- had caused their disappearance was powerful.  
But now...  
Lina stood up. "Gourry and I will investigate." The prince looked at her, surprised. "And don't even think of offering to pay us (besides covering our basic expenses, of course). Zel and Amelia were friends. This is personal." Besides, Lina thought, there's bound to be treasure involved -- why else would something powerful enough to make those two just vanish be hanging around there? It didn't hurt, of course, that she remember Amelia having said something about the castle and its lands having been clearly declared a century ago to be the rightful reward for whomever solved the mystery. 

Lina and Gourry set out early the next morning. The messenger, a young mercenary named Miles Forrest, was on a fresh horse from the royal stables, riding with them. Prince Philionel had requested that Miles guide Lina and Gourry to Clearwater Farm, and provide directions on to Rose Castle itself.  
Prince Philionel watched as the three rode off, hoping that Lina and Gourry would find his daughter alive... 

Lina and Gourry looked at the castle. It was a tall foreboding building. It reeked of forebodings. It made a distinct effort to set the record on exuding forebodings.  
Aside from its problem with forebodings, it had incredible stonework and, even outside of the castle proper, the glass windows were incredibly beautiful; this was not a castle that was designed to be a drafty old fortress. This castle had been constructed to be a beautiful yet functional work of art and comfortable place to live. If it hadn't the air of general unniceness, this would be the waking world's example of the palace of her fondest fantasies. 

**+===+ +===+ +===+  
Once Upon A Time In Saillune  
+===+ By Ryo Hoshi +===+  
Part 1:  
Set Adrift on a Nightmare Sea  
+===+ +===+ +===+  
Cut loose in a nightmare, cast off in my dreams  
-- _Poison Moon_, Elvis Costello  
+===+ +===+ +===+**

The castle's grounds were well-kept. There were archers' targets along one wall, which were in good repair and even had a few arrows sticking in them. Lina glanced at where the arrows were, and hoped that she never had to rely on the archer whom had put them there. Along the opposite wall hung, in a theoretical sort of way, several sword-practice dummies. Against the wall itself was a sizable pile of relatively fresh ex-dummies. Unless Amelia had taken up swordwork... But Zelgadiss wasn't somebody Lina could easily see _demolishing_ practice dummies. The few times Lina saw Zelgadiss attacking practice dummies, he had 'killed' them with a minimum of strokes, all of them graceful, and with a minimum of mess to clean up. A small voice noted, at the back of Lina's mind, that Gourry in action against practice dummies was even more of a treat to watch...  
Aside from that, though, the grounds were unusually neat. It looked rather like one castle Lina had once visited in early in her travels, when she had her first direct encounter with a mazoku. The captain of the castle guards's favorite punishment was to instruct the offending parties to clean up the grounds. It was not something she quite wanted to be reminded of, given how much trouble the entire incident had been. 

Lina Inverse and Gourry Gabriev looked around the great hall of the castle. It was two stories high, and by Lina's estimates it was perhaps slightly larger than the main ballroom of the palace in the capital... The ceiling was vaulted stone, and Lina could barely believe that there could be a floor above it, though she knew that there had to be at least one.  
Heavy curtains had once covered the lower halves of the walls near the doors of the great hall. But the curtains were gone now, and all that remained was the hardware that had held them to the wall. There was, to the left, a door. To the right was an open archway. Each, had the curtains still been there, would have been hidden from public view.  
Lina looked towards the open archway, and then towards the door. The door looked more interesting. It was clear to Lina that it led to much less public rooms, while the section that was accessed by the open archway was merely not made obvious to the public most of the time.  
This, of course, meant that of the two it would be the most interesting to explore. "Gourry, why don't we split up? It'll take less time to search the castle for any clues, and from what Amelia said I doubt the castle's dangerous during the day."  
Gourry, possibly purely out of self preservation, nodded. "Alright, Lina!"  
"I'll take the left!" 

Lina turned the knob and carefully pushed the door inwards. It swung open silently, as if it was freshly and regularly oiled.  
The door opened onto a hall. On the long wall directly across from this door were two evenly spaced doors, and also at each end was a single door. Aside from these doors and the lamps, the hall was empty. Lina walked into the hall, and started towards the nearest of the doors. She stopped with her hand on its knob, however, as she noticed something unusual about the lamp fixtures.  
They had been designed to be normally lit by the ball of light created by a light spell, and, though they could hold candles in an emergency, it'd be unwise to frequently use candles in them... _The prince for whom this place was built for and his wife must have been sorcerers,_ Lina realized. There was no other reason for such lamps otherwise...  
Lina felt a chill in her bones; she knew that Amelia and Zelgadiss couldn't have failed to notice that, too.  
Lina had known when she'd decided to investigate that her friends hadn't been the first sorcerers to vanish from there, and it was very unlikely that no sorcerers would have tried to solve the mystery of Rose Castle before Amelia and Zelgadiss. But there was a difference between knowing and _knowing_ something in such a deep-down way that you can't ignore it.  
The door Lina first tried was one of the two doors at the ends of the hallway. It swung towards her, and she found herself looking into a bedroom. She walked around the room, giving it a cursory inspection. It was rounded, a reflection of its location inside the corner tower. The room was around four stories tall, with four rose windows. Each of the windows was positioned carefully to be nearly a quarter of a turn away from the previous one, or at least have that appearance.  
The largest was nearly a story tall, by Lina's rough estimates, and would be located at around the center of the tower's outer wall with its bottom at least a story above the ground. A lone winged figure inhabited it, her gold and black hair filling what sections of the background that her white wings didn't. She was wearing a simple sapphire dress, and in her cupped hands floated a round, clear gem.  
On the other side, just above the center a rail-less cresent-shaped loft that was around the same distance from the floor, there was a smaller rose window filled by a stylized dragon's head in the colors of flames with single light blue piece of cut glass for its eye. It was set into a shallow box, and Lina suspected that there were hidden hinges so a light could be placed behind it.  
The final two windows were across from each other, each one having a stone ledge running beneath them that went up to perhaps a hand's width beneath the window. There was a bed against each stone ledge, and upon them were a few assorted items that Lina guessed had belonged to Amelia and Zelgadiss.  
Lina paused, a slight twinge of conscious reminding her that it would be nosy to go through their things before she gave herself a small token excuse. Lina then went to the less filled one of the shelves. The stained glass window above it depicted a Healer's Rose blossom in full bloom. On one of the deep red-pink petals had been set a piece of clear faceted crystal, looking like a drop of dew. Lina touched the crystal, and a small smile of appreciation twitched over her mouth; whoever had made the window had taken the time to use rock crystal.  
On the ledge beneath the rose-blossom window was a sword-care kit and an ornate medium-sized jewel box. Lina quickly went through the sword-care kit; she knew from experience what to look for in one, especially when it came to assessing the quality of its materials. This one -- Lina knew it had to be Zelgadiss's, as she knew Amelia would never keep one -- was of the highest quality she had seen in a long time... Lina's brow wrinkled with a sudden suspicion, and she looked at the kit a bit closer.  
_I thought I knew this style of kit,_ Lina thought upon locating the seller's mark, one that she had known from childhood. _Dad's certainly managed to maintain the quality of his goods._  
As she put the kit back together and back on the shelf, she wondered slightly if Zelgadiss had realized that she was related to **those** Inverses.  
The jewelry box was quickly looked-through. It contained, mostly, the normal items of jewelry of theirs, such Amelia's earrings and Zelgadiss's brooch. There were also a few mysterious pieces, particularly a matching set of jewelry -- earrings, necklace, and a ring -- of white gold with deep sky-blue topazes and deep blue sapphires, which had been carefully wrapped in pale blue silk and tucked into a black velvet bag.  
The window above the other ledge was split in half by a sword, with a clear cut gem in its pommel. On the left side of the sword was a young man being knighted, and on the right the same man was riding out, presumably to perform good deeds, with the same sword at his side as the one that divided the window. The ledge had on it a writing kit, two books wrapped in protective covers, and Zelgadiss's sword lay at the very back of the ledge.  
Lina opened up the writing kit and discovered that it was nothing interesting. It contained a couple pens and brushes, several carefully labeled packets of dry ink powder, an ink stick & stone, and a well. All of them were of good quality, but rather standard. The most exceptional items were some of the ink powders, and that only because they would not be often carried by anybody but a sorcerer.  
The two books with protective outer covers turned out to be diaries. Well, though Lina was certain that Zel would insist that his solemn-looking one, completely encased in plain high-quality black leather, was a journal, Lina was just as certain that it was a diary. The other one was encased in creamy white leather, and from the feel of the seams Lina guessed that the cover was made up of perhaps two layers of good leather, with a middle layer containing some fabric with protection spells for the book on them. It was clearly something Amelia would carry; it was likely that this would eventually find itself a home in some archive of royal papers of the Saillunese royal house, documenting the youthful adventures of Queen Amelia the First for future generations of the royal house. Locks had been attached to the flaps of both of them, good brass ones which would require effort to break even if they did lack any spells to prevent somebody from opening them without the right key.  
Under the two books were the keys; it was obvious that neither Amelia nor Zelgadiss had been expecting anybody to be coming into there. Lina carefully unlocked the black one and unfolded the outer cover. The journal itself was elegantly cloth-bound with navy blue cloth, and a navy ribbon marked the last entry, nearly two-thirds of the way into the book. Lina carefully opened it to there, and looked curiously at the page. The entry had been written in a strange script that Lina was completely unfamiliar with.  
Lina then unlocked Amelia's diary. Her diary had a leather cover that matched the outer cover, and a cream ribbon near its end. Lina opened it up to the ribbon...and found more of the same script that she had seen in Zel's journal.  
Lina looked at the start of Amelia's dairy: still the same unknown script. She then looked at the first page of Zel's journal, and saw it written in the familiar script that was normally used. There were comments in the margins in a different hand. She leafed through, and to her disappointment discovered that the last page in a script she could read was written while Zelgadiss had been traveling with Amelia, Gourry and herself and trying to find the Clair Bible.  
Lina put them back as they had been and left the room. 

Lina walked back into the hallway, and noticed a small door on her left, just beside the door that led to the great hall. Curious, she opened the door to find a narrow, tightly spiraling, and dimly lit staircase made out of wrought iron.  
Lina lifted her palm and cast Lighting. Sending the resulting ball of light on ahead of her, she climbed the stairs. Eventually, a small doorway in them opened out to another hallway; the stairs looked like they went up for another floor or two. Lina glanced up quickly, and saw that a skylight had been installed to provide the stairs with light. Like all the windows she had seen so far, it was stained glass.  
She shook her head in disbelief. Why would anybody install a stained glass skylight over a hidden staircase? It wasn't like anybody would get to admire it...  
Lina stepped into the hallway to do a bit of exploring. Between the end of the hallway -- Lina estimated far end of this hallway roughly corresponded with the far end of the near-identical hallway downstairs -- were two rooms. It was a bit shorter the hallway downstairs, though, and peeking through the door at the very end she found that this was how you were supposed to get to the loft in the main bedroom if you couldn't use flight spells.  
A small table with two chairs stood on the loft's floor, dustless but nevertheless still looking unused, sat. Lina ventured further in, and noticed that there were columns of bookshelves to either side of the door, as tight as possible against the wall. They were only broken by the door she had come through and the rose window depicting Ceified, the polished metal lining the inside of the box behind it gleaming through the glass.  
She stepped to the table to take a closer look at the small wooden box on it, and noticed that, inlaid in the table's top was a marble chessboard. Carefully opening the box, she discovered that inside was an exquisitely carved stone chess set. The black pieces, to her experienced judgment, were marble; on some pieces, small red gems, perhaps rubies, had been set into the pieces as eyes. The white set looked to have been carved from alabaster, and set into some of its pieces were small blue gems -- given the quality of the pieces, she guessed they were sapphires. No two pieces looked the same, either; as Lina went through the set, she found that even the pawns were each unique. One of the black bishops caught her eye; she laughed slightly after realizing why. The chess set was a Ceified versus Shabraningdo style set, and from its looks Lina decided that it must have been carved very soon after the War of the Demon's Fall... That meant it was as old as the castle -- and worth the price of a small kingdom.  
Lina put the chess pieces back into the box gently, and closed it. She wondered, idly, if she could teach Gourry chess, and left the room. As she went back to the stairs, she glanced into the two rooms on the floor.  
The one closer to the bedroom had been, once upon a time, a nursery. Its large rectangular window, a stained glass window as always, was a pastel riot of color depicting a white wolf sitting and looking _incredibly_ doggish in a surreal forest with a wreath of flowers around his neck. Beneath the window was a window seat and an old-fashioned cradle, which, if any of its clothes had been on it, would have completely hidden any evidence of there being a baby inside.  
The other room had been set up as a study, with three narrow stained glass windows, all on hinges. The left one, Lina noticed, depicted a large Healer's Rose, and the one to the far right was an abstract version of the Saillune royal house's crest. The center window showed a gold and clear burst of light. Taking up most of the room was a massive desk, with an old-looking chair behind it.  
Lina went back to the stares and up to the next floor, this one closed off from the stairs by a door. This floor, she discovered, was one a long room that was as wide as both the hall and the two rooms off of it on the floor below, and about as long as those two rooms, too. There were several stained glass windows on one of its walls, all of them depicting some heroic act from one or another fairy tale. The room itself was painted blue, and was unfurnished. There was an aura of...waiting. Like the room was still waiting for the young princes for whom it had been intended...  
The next floor was hardly better; it looked almost exactly the same as the one below, except that its walls were pink and its windows depicted, instead of heroic acts, romantic scenes from fairy tales. This room, too, was waiting, this time for princesses who had yet to arrive.  
Lina stepped out and carefully swung the door shut. Glancing up, she looked at the skylight. There were seven rounds of pastel colors surrounding a large piece of clear crystal that had been cut to increase the light coming through the window. From there, at the top of the stairs, it was surprisingly light and airy. She went back down the stairs, intending to finish exploring the hall on the first floor. 

Meanwhile, Gourry wandered through the maze of the servant's quarters and guest rooms that lay beyond the archway. He very quickly quit trying to figure out the building's layout; it had been designed so that one would need a guide if they were not used to traveling the halls. Instead, he was simply looking for a single normal window. The closest he had come, so far, was one badly done piece of stained glass.  
He also looked for one sign of dirt or ill repair. Aside from the aura of disuse and lack of habitation, though, each room looked amazingly clean, lacking even any furniture aside from the occasional piece made of a material more durable than wood, leather, or cloth. 

The first room on the first floor was depressingly plain. It was, like almost every single other room Lina had explored, incredibly clean and very empty. The window was the most interesting thing in the room. It was a long, rectangular window mostly made of pale blue rippled glass, with a pale pink lotus in the lower left corner and a light green leaf beside it with a bit of cut glass or rock crystal for a droplet of water. Lina supposed it had been intended to be eventually turned into a parlor, or a spare bedroom.  
The next room was a very plain sitting room and library. There were two cushions on the floor, clearly brought to the castle recently, in front of a fireplace on the right-hand wall. This room, like the loft, had bookshelves along almost all of the wall, except for the fireplace & hearth and a pair of French doors directly across from the hallway's door.  
Lina looked at the double French doors. It was a small work of art; the panels of stained glass in it -- Lina wondered if there was a single pane of normal glass in the entire building -- showing a tangle of pink-red roses. She recognized the kind of rose, too, as Healer's Roses. Lina thought this was appropriate for a castle that had been built for a prince of Saillune.  
She opened the door -- noticing as she did so that the doors' knobs had been cast in the shape of a bloom from a Healer's Rose -- and looked into what was beyond them. She gasped. Amelia and Zelgadiss must have been busy, for the garden in the walled courtyard that the doors opened up on showed few signs of having ever lost its gardeners.  
Well, with the exception of the water garden, which was badly overgrown. Lina smiled to herself. She wouldn't have expected that the chimera would be so devoted a gardener as to _almost_ completely restore a formal garden.  
Lina wandered among the plantings. She occasionally stopped to admire an usually rare specimen; the garden was planted completely with plants used in magic, and only a few of the plants were particularly common. A few were even ones that she'd never seen before, even in the gardens kept by magicians' guilds. This garden, Lina knew, was the kind that people sometimes fought over now -- she doubted that some of the plants inside it could be easily found elsewhere.  
This wasn't as comforting a thought as it would have been elsewhere. Elsewhere, Lina would have been free to gloat over her luck and think about how she was going to get her new plants to market.  
Here, though, she had to wonder why nobody else had dared take rootings from these plants.  
Lina settled on a stone bench hidden inside a dense group of thick rosebushes -- whomever had originally planted this garden must have been very fond of roses, she thought idly -- and let her mind drift. 

Gourry looked around the small stone sitting room. Straight across from him were a pair of French doors, standing wide open and leading to a garden. Behind him was the door to the hallway, and to his left was a wooden door that, from his previous investigations, he knew led to the kitchen. He paused, and decided that Lina was most likely to be in the garden.  
Once in the garden, he stopped every so often to sniff at a flower or plant. Lina, looking out through a gap in the roses, watched as Gourry came closer. She grinned, and waited until Gourry was walking past her hiding place.  
Gourry stiffened when he felt Lina's arms wrap around his waist. "Lina!" he yelled as she giggled, somewhat insanely. "Don't **do** that!"  
Lina just looked up at him, her grin wide enough that her eyes were closed. He sighed, and ruffled her hair.  
"I found the kitchen, Lina. Want to search it for some lunch?" 

Lina followed Gourry into the kitchen. The room was long, and from the way it was set up Lina guessed that it could at least feed as many as the kitchen of the palace in the capital of Saillune. These were kitchens designed for those who enjoyed food.  
Lina could see, at the far end of the kitchen, a pair of wooden doors. Lina paused, thinking over the layout of the castle. If the greenhouse attached walled garden was to her left and the back wall of both the castle proper and the kitchen were behind her, and the kitchen stretched for as long as she thought it did...that'd mean that those doors opened out into the main courtyard. She supposed that since the one single door close to her on the right opened into the small hallway, the two pairs of double-doors farther on opened into the great hall. Not a normal layout for a castle, she knew, but then she'd yet to see any evidence that this castle was normal.  
She shrugged; the bizarre layout of the castle was probably not that important. The kitchen's contents, on the other hand...  
Lina and Gourry had, in the few times that they had stayed in an abandoned building, developed a search pattern especially designed for making sure they knew where all the food was in a kitchen. It had been perfected over years of experience. They rarely left any of food found in edible condition still uneaten after their search.  
The kitchen was well organized, and had been scrubbed cleaner than any kitchen the pair had seen in their lives, considering how long it had been since Zelgadiss and Amelia had vanished. Lina was willing to swear that, if it had not been so long since that kitchen had been last cleaned, it would have been significantly cleaner than even the kitchen at her childhood home which her sister always was making her clean.  
However, while the kitchen was clean, it was also almost completely bare of anything that could be eaten without any cooking. For once, there was food that could be eaten without cooking left after Lina and Gourry finished their search...  
The flat, dry crackers were not, in their opinion, edible.  
Lina ended up sitting in front of the stove, a pot of water sitting ready on top of it, trying to remember what her sister had told her about how to cook rice and hoping there was enough of it. Gourry, she noticed, was leafing through a book.  
As she was about to give up trying to remember and just light the stove with a low-powered fireball, she remembered what her sister had said.  
She sighed, and walked over to Gourry, and realized that he was reading a recipe book. He looked up at her and smiled. "Hey, Lina, I think I might be able to make this!" he said, and showed her a recipe for a fried and spiced rice dish. Lina glanced at the ingredients, and noted that the kitchen had all of them in stock.  
Lina blinked. "You can cook...?"  
"No," Gourry said.  
Lina looked at him, and sighed. She _wanted_ to hurt him for that, but... She was hungry. And she burned water when she tried to boil it. "Just make it...and make a _lot_ of it. I'm going to go explore some more..." 

After eating, they returned to the room Amelia and Zelgadiss had set up as a bedroom. Lina sat down on one of the beds and sighed. "Did you notice anything interesting, Gourry?"  
Gourry sat down on the other bed. A slight frown creased his features for a few seconds as he thought. "I think Amelia and Zel were sleeping together."  
Lina blinked in surprise, then yelled at the unfortunate swordsman, "What makes you think _that_?!"  
He shrugged. "This bed has been slept in more recently then that one, and the one you're sitting on's been made."  
Lina could feel the nervous twitch that she knew had to be on her face. This place was getting to her; the jellyfish was noticing things sooner than she was. The bed she was sitting on had the general feel and look of the one bed at an inn that was rented perhaps only once or twice a year, and the sheets on the bed he was sitting on were a mess.  
Lina looked closer at the set up of the room. Zelgadiss's sword _was_ on the ledge near this bed, and from what Lina vaguely remembered Gourry having mentioned to her before about Zel and that sword, she was certain that the only reason he would have had his sword so far away from the bed would be because he was sharing it. It would have been impractical to hang his sword on the bedpost or lie it too near the ledge's edge, especially considering what Lina knew about Amelia.  
Lina got up and shooed Gourry out, telling him to check the kitchen again for food, stray monsters, and food in that order. Once he was out, she ran her hands over the sheets, feeling for invisible stains that might tell her just how intimate the last two to sleep in that bed might have been...  
Hm, she thought. No rough spots or stains, so they probably hadn't been having sex... So why would they share a bed? Zel, she knew, never found his nightmares to be so bad that he would share a bed with anyone. Amelia she was less sure about; she had never known Amelia to have a nightmare that Lina would admit was a nightmare, and the very idea of Amelia having a nightmare seemed somehow strange to Lina.  
She paused. _Yes_, she thought, _that might be possible._ She quickly inspected the floor for stains.  
The only thing she discovered was that the floor had the general appearance of a floor that had been scrubbed by a very enthusiastic maid. This, really, showed nothing aside from the fact that this maid had struck here, too.  
Lina stood up, and looked at the made and unslept-in bed. _Well,_ she thought to herself, _I might as well check it too._ She lifted up the top sheet and blanket and gave them a shake with a practiced snap of her wrist. She then folded it back, so she could easily feel the bottom sheet.  
"Lina? I've checked the kitchen again," said a very familiar voice from the door. Lina turned to look at Gourry, blushing. "There's still the old crackers...Lina, why are you blushing?  
"If you want that bed, I don't mind..."  
Lina sighed in relief. "Yes, Gourry, I want this bed. Why don't you go take a bath and let me set up my stuff?"  
"Okay Lina!" Gourry said with a smile. As he walked off to the baths, Lina finished checking her bed, finding it was clean too. She then started unpacking her things and setting them up on the ledge, carefully putting Amelia's and Zelgadiss's possessions away. 

Gourry randomly draped his clothes in the changing room. Normally, he took more care, but there was no reason to here. The only other person in the building was Lina, and he knew Lina had seen all of his clothing before -- both while it was on him and while it was off him.  
He poked his head into the actual bathroom, and grinned. Lina had been the one who had inspected the bath-outbuilding, but Lina hadn't said anything about it having hot water! Sulfur-smelling steam drifted lazily up from the surface of the tiled pool.  
There was, somewhat unexpectedly, a separate area for the actual bathing, separated from the sunken tiled pool by a low wall, which would be about knee-high. On this side of the wall was a raised grate for washing over, a short stool, and a trough of water in which a hybrid of bucket and ladle was lazily floating.  
Gourry looked for a little, then mentally shrugged. He hadn't been in this style of bathhouse in years, but he had grown up using one like this. It wasn't something he had forgotten, either.  
Gourry sat down and started lathering up his washcloth.  
It had been a long while since he had last actually dealt with this kind of bathhouse. In most places, the artificial look of the pool for soaking -- no less having the pool distinctly separate from the washing area -- would be considered at best old-fashioned. Still, Gourry felt that there was something better about the old style of bathhouses. It didn't seem right, really, the new-style ones.  
He carefully scrubbed himself. It was a calming activity. His hair got a complete washing, also. It wasn't a hard task, even though normally after exploring a place like this he could expect to spend hours washing dust and cobwebs out of his hair. He used the bucket-ladle to rinse himself and his hair, and climbed into the soaking pool, which from the smell and feel of the water he guessed was piped from a hot spring.  
_Hm,_ he thought to himself. _I wonder how the view is from the curtain walls..._

Gourry looked out over the curtain wall of the castle, enjoying the slight breeze on his still-damp skin and his still-wet hair. It was a good clear day so he could see all the way to the horizon, and, as the countryside was mostly flat, the horizon was quite far away. He remembered when he was young, and his father would take him on up on the walls of whichever castle they were at and point out the landscape; true, most of what his father said was about the strategic advantages and disadvantages of the landscape, but to Gourry this was normal.  
There weren't many things worth looking at, though. Much of the area around the castle and to the north of it was moorland, though judging from the ruins of buildings that he could see, it was once farms. Even with those ruins, it was unlikely that anybody could turn up unexpected from that direction.  
To the south and close to the castle lay Clearwater Farm -- or, as the locals called it, The Farm. From what Miles Forrest had told him and Lina on the way to the castle, it was also home to the most beautiful girl in the area, Laraine Moorlands, who just happened to be his fiancée. Gourry guessed that, on foot, it would take only two or three hours for somebody to walk to the castle from there, and it would be easy to see anyone from that direction.  
Only an hour away from The Farm, on the same road, lay the small village of Rose. Lina had dubbed it Spot on the Road when they had passed through it on their way to the castle. Gourry decided that Lina had been wrong in calling it that; there were some buildings there that were not visible from the road. However, there weren't many.  
There was no real concealment in all directions on all approaches to the castle. It would be easy to see anybody approaching the castle. The castle was safe from any sneak attacks.  
_Still,_ Gourry thought, _maybe Lina and I should visit The Farm and Rose every so often. It wouldn't be too hard to walk to either place and back in a day..._  
Movement on the road caught Gourry's eyes. He looked downwards and saw a cart on the road. From the horses harnessed to it, it was clear that it was from a farm -- from Clearwater.  
Gourry stood up and stretched. Something floating between what was normal thought to most people and pure animal instinct turned Gourry's feet towards the stairs, and took him down to the main courtyard. He looked around a bit, and with what could be called a mental shrug he snagged a sword off of the rack of dull practice blades that stood just under the stairs up to the curtain wall. He moved towards the center of the courtyard and started a sword drill. 

A young woman on a cart knocked on their gates in the late mid-afternoon. Lina opened the gates, and the woman drove the cart into the courtyard and expertly stopped it near the outside door of the kitchens. Gourry kept wisely out of the way, going through the elaborate dance-like steps of a sword drill. Lina, on the other hand, was distracted, partially due to the fact that Gourry was currently shirtless, and was quickly drafted for basket transportation duty.  
By the time Lina's mind returned to the here and now, Lina was carrying in the last basket. She felt obliged to protest. "Hey! Who do you...?"  
"I'm Aletta Moorlands, from The Farm. I guess you and your cute blond are Inverse-san and Gabriev-san?"  
"You've seen Gourry." Lina watched as Aletta bustled about the kitchen, putting up the contents of her baskets in the kitchen, and thought of hummingbirds. Aletta, in her bright multicolored dress and with her deep teal hair, looked like one.  
"Is that your husband's name?" Aletta winked one of her sparkling hazel eyes at Lina's blush; had just a few glances at the jellyfish's shirtless sword drill said that to the woman? Aletta's vocal torrent rushed on, forestalling any protest from Lina, as she continued to bustle about. "He's a handsome one. Oh, dear, it looks like Ame-chan used up the allspice, it'll be a week before I can restock it..."  
"Why are you in the kitchen?" Lina asked. She filed her other question -- "When did Amelia learn to cook?" -- for later.  
"Didn't Prince Philionel tell you? I'm in charge of making sure you have food." Aletta stopped her bustling about, which brought precious respite to Lina's mind. "It was my soon-to-be brother-in-law who rode to the Capital to tell him of his daughter's disappearance." Aletta sighed. "Ame-chan was such a nice girl, though I never got to meet her man-friend..."  
Lina grinned in spite of herself. That would be like Zelgadiss, hiding when company came. Of course, she couldn't quite blame the antisocial chimera for avoiding Aletta. Aletta and Amelia at once would have been...scary. Very scary.  
"...and the coffee's almost completely gone again..." Lina smiled nervously. Aletta hadn't noticed Lina's attention drifting off into the realm of esoterica and had continued her out-loud inventory of the kitchen's supplies.  
Just then, Gourry walked into the kitchen, still shirtless. Lina didn't notice her slight blush at noticing that the slight sheen of sweat on his skin gave it a satiny look. Gourry, who under normal circumstances (which these were not) would need a room full of clues to figure out why Lina was blushing at him, eyed Lina warily. Lina blushing was not a good sign; the last time he could remember seeing her blush like that, it was just before she punished him for defending her from some bandits who had thought it'd be a good idea to attack a naked girl while she was soaking in some hot springs.  
(Gourry felt that this had been rather unfair of Lina, and maybe a bit...unwise. He was right on the second one: he most definitely would have seen less of Lina if she hadn't insisted on kicking him while he was down **while** she was still naked. The view had been haunting Gourry's dreams... He wasn't sure why these dreams also involved black leather, a whip, and Lina demanding that he call her Queen.) 

The rest of the day went relatively smoothly. Lina and Gourry settled into the one bedroom that was prepared for use, carefully putting away the artifacts left behind by the previous inhabitants of the room. The light conversation while they worked might have been forced and artificial, but they didn't want to be reminded of their missing comrades more often than they had to be.  
Dinner was early, and a makeshift affair. Gourry had only a slightly better idea how to cook than Lina, which meant that dinner had a high charcoal content. The fact that the meal was peaceful and quiet was blamed solely on this, and it certainly was partially responsible. Neither of them ever did feel particularly inclined to fight over burnt food.  
After dinner, they went to bed. It had been a rather long day. 

Lina groaned and sat up. That, she decided, was one hell of a nightmare. It didn't have much staying power, though. Already, she could only recall fragments of the dream.  
But they were vivid fragments, of pain and loss and loneliness.  
She shook her head. _Best not to dwell on it, after all. Gourry's here, and he's alive, and he's whole. And,_ she added, _I'm not alone._  
She slipped out of bed, planning on heading off to the kitchen to get some hardtack to gnaw on. As she was about to go out the door of the room, however, she glanced over to Gourry and froze.  
Gourry, too, was having a nightmare, and if the way he was tangling up the sheets was any indication it was a bad one. Lina padded up to the bedside, and just stood there for a few moments, watching him and listening to the soft cries, trying to make sense of them. After one that sounded suspiciously like her name, Lina reached out and shook his shoulder.  
His eyes snapped open, and Lina found herself suddenly being held in a tight embrace. Gourry was stroking her hair and back, and his nose was tickling the side of her neck. He was murmuring something, and Lina could sense his relief at finding out that whatever he had been dreaming had been only dream...  
She rather automatically patted his back. It just felt like the right thing to do. 

Eventually, Gourry calmed down. He sat in silence for several long seconds, with one arm gently wrapped around Lina's back just under her arms and his other hand resting at the small of her back. Lina's breathing was smooth, relaxed, her eyes closed, her hands drifting in his hair and on his back purposelessly.  
Lina wiggled closer to him with a contented hmm, and opened her eyes. Soon afterwards, she noticed that her mind was screaming something about Gourry. Cuddling him. _What?_ Lina looked at what her eyes were seeing.  
_Oh_, she thought. _I'm cuddling the jellyfish. Warm!_  
Then her mind made a last-ditch attempt to get her attention, and Lina wiggled out of Gourry's arms. "Let's go to the kitchen." A late night snack will be perfect, Lina thought. A small now-ignored voice at the back of her mind added something about cuddling up some more with a certain blond afterwards. 

Lina gnawed on some hardtack and watched Gourry busy himself warming milk in a pan over the kitchen fire. She had been rather surprised that Gourry had been able to find the pan and the milk, and was even more amazed when Gourry started warming the milk like he done this a thousand times.  
She was only slightly more surprised when she sipped at the mug Gourry handed her. It was perfect. He had warmed it to just the right temperature, and hadn't burned it. He smiled happily at her surprised expression and held up his own mug. "I can get a fire going in the fireplace in the sitting room, Lina."  
Lina looked at Gourry. He didn't look like he was trying to pull anything... "Alright! Let's go!" 

Gourry stared blankly at the bottom of his cup. His nightmare was only just starting to fade, but he knew he would be not able to go back to sleep that night...not until he was able to forget seeing Lina's corpse in his nightmare, and it being all his his fault... He glanced at the real Lina, who was still sipping at her mug, to reassure himself that she was still alive.  
Lina was on her stomach on the rug in front of the fireplace. She held in her hands her own empty mug, thinking and compulsively sipping at her mug. Mainly, she was wondering about her companion. He was being unusually quiet, almost moody. This, Lina was finding, was more disturbing than the dog-ends of her own nightmare.  
Whatever had happened in his nightmare, she thought, it had to have been bad. 

When they both were ready to admit that the warm milk was gone, they wandered out of the small library and back to their bedroom, stopping in the kitchen to leave the mugs. 

Lina looked across the room at Gourry. She sighed. Might as well, she thought. "Hey, Gourry!"  
Gourry turned from his solemn inspection of the bed Lina had assigned him earlier. "Yes, Lina?"  
"C'mo'ver here!" she commanded. Gourry blinked, and with a mental shrug walked over. "Get in."  
Gourry looked at the spot where Lina was pointing: the bed that she had chosen for herself. Blink. Blink. "Lina? Are you feeling okay?" Gourry felt her forehead. "You don't seem to have a fever..."  
"Gourry...I'm feeling fine. Get in." Lina looked at his expression and sighed. "I won't fireball you."  
"Really?" There was something very puppyish to Gourry's expression.  
"Yes. Now," Lina's expression darkened, "get in!" Gourry quickly obeyed.  
In the landscape of Lina's psyche, Lina's Id was waving a pair of victory fans, much to the annoyance of her ego; Lina's superego was in its usual state of comatoseness. 

The next morning, Lina's mind struggled up from the depths of sleep.  
Her thoughts went like this:  
_I like my nice bed. I like my teddy bear. I like my room... So nice, safe, and familiar...  
Wait, where's those oh-so-familiar sounds of the city in the morning? And why does my teddy bear seem a bit...larger than usual?  
Didn't I run away from home?_  
She opened up her eyes and discovered that what she had thought was her teddy bear (which, she had to admit, she did miss, but no self-respecting enemy of all who live would carry a teddy bear around) was actually Gourry.  
He was already quite awake.  
Lina lazily thought that Gourry looked rather cute early in the morning, with that classic look she usually saw on bandits about to meet one of her fireballs... Of course, she knew that she should hurt him for feeling up a sweet innocent girl like herself in her sleep. But breakfast first. 

Lina looked at her mug and sighed.  
It was the third night in a row where they had ended up sitting quietly until dawn and their seventh night in the building. Sharing a bed had helped...but not enough; their sleep had still been fitful.  
Time to do something, Lina thought. I can't keep getting only a few hours of sleep at night.  
And if Gourry's mood doesn't improve soon...  
"I was alone," she said, more to her cup and the floor than to Gourry. "I was alone in a large gloomy forest, and for some reason my magic wouldn't work. And the trees were leafless, and the sky dark. And there was _the_ slug..."  
Lina stopped, not sure if she should go into more detail.  
There was a soft creak from the chair Gourry was in as he got up and silently left the room.  
Lina looked after him, and then went back to brooding over her empty mug and obsessing over slugs. A few minutes passed this way, and then she sensed Gourry's return.  
Gourry didn't sit back down in his chair, but rather beside her. In one hand he carried his own mug, in the other he held the pan he had been using to warm the milk. He carefully refilled Lina's mug.  
They sat beside each other in silence for a while.  
Lina wondered how much it would take for Gourry to start telling her about his own nightmares. She really didn't want to talk too much about her own nightmare... She sighed, and started talking again. "I wondered where you were..."  
Gourry looked up at her, the look in his eyes impossible for Lina to read. "I dreamed I was in the middle of a small war."  
"What?" Lina said, blinking. That sounded too deep for Gourry...  
"A large group of bandits."  
Lina realized what he meant. "Oh."  
Gourry hung his head. He wanted so much to tell Lina about his nightmare -- of how the two of them had been camping out with Zelgadiss and Amelia, and of how a large group of bandits had attacked, and... He had been on watch. He should have been awake so he could have woken up the others before the bandits...  
He sipped his warm milk and wished that he could forget the dream as easily as he seemed to forget everything else...  
Lina sipped at her own mug, and thought about her own nightmare.  
She had, eventually, found Gourry and the others. There was some mazoku, and they were fighting it. Lina knew that she could take it out and would have to but... It had looked like a giant slug.  
She had frozen up. And the mazoku had...  
Lina took a deep breath. She wasn't going to think about _that_. Nor was she going to think about the slug mazoku's gloating laugh...  
Lina took a gulp of the warm milk, and tried to concentrate her wandering thoughts on the swallow's warmth as it went down and, hopefully, _**not**_ waxing poetic about slugs & mazoku again. 

Aletta arrived as usual that morning. Along for the ride this time was also her small daughter, Alida. Aletta's gossip was welcomed by Lina, and Lina found Alida's interest in magic to be flattering.  
Gourry joined them, and the gossip dragged on for hours. 

That night, they once again crept into the same bed and fell asleep.  
Gourry went straight back into his nightmare.  
The dream started on a normal night from when all four of them had been traveling together. No inn being nearby, they set up camp a good distance away from the road and were all settling in for the night. Gourry was told to take the first watch.  
It was a warm summery night, the full moon was high and the stars clear. Not a night that was likely for anybody to attack, in Gourry's somewhat knowledgeable opinion. Not a night, too, that was designed to keep a body awake...  
At some point, his waking self knew, he'd doze off -- and then the disaster Lina had sown would strike, when he couldn't but should have been able to protect her.  
Attack enough bandits, and a large number of them might someday wreak their unrighteous vengeance.  
Gourry's awareness of the dream snapped back as the fight truly started. Lina herself was already out of the fight, the bandits having snuck into camp and made sure she was dead. Amelia was under a sleep spell, and being carried off by a trio of ragged dirty men; Gourry knew what was likely to happen to her next, having seen some of his fellow mercenaries' ideas of how to celebrate a victory...  
Zelgadiss was trying to fight his own way to Amelia. He was felling bandits left and right, but they were making an effort to keep themselves between him and Amelia. Gourry could hear fragments of their taunts over the sounds of fighting. Perhaps the only reason Gourry figured out why the bandits were taunting Zelgadiss was because he was not very bright; to him, the thought that Zelgadiss could be driven into a blind fury was not unthinkable.  
Gourry felt that he should be in the fight himself...doing something to avenge Lina...but he felt so strangely weak. He tried to pick up the Sword of Light, tried to get up and join the small battle... His legs, which had been feeling strangely warm and wet suddenly throbbed with hurt and weakness; his hands found only empty air where the hilt of the Sword should be and an empty scabbard. He collapsed back to the ground and looked at his legs.  
His leggings were a bloody purple, the ground where he had been sitting was dark red-brown and wet... His mind, never particularly fast at the best of times, was blank; he looked dumbly at the matching pair of wounds on his thighs, wondering why he could barely feel his legs. They were still there, that he could see, but...  
There was a rustle, and he glanced up. A figure in a cape was sitting beside him. There was something familiar about the caped man, Gourry thought. "Ahhh...you're awake," the man said happily. Something about the tone sent Gourry's hand back to where the Sword had been, which caused a low laugh from the other man. Gourry felt his chest tighten as the man held up an oh-so-familiar sword. "Looking for this?" Gourry lunged towards the sword, ignoring the pain, but the man just stood up and, opening his slitted eyes, gazed down at his victim in amusement. "Did you really think that'd work?" he said.  
Gourry just glared upwards, anger burning in his eyes. The oft-ignored bit of intelligence that lived behind his eyes commented about the fact that his sword's blade had blood on it, and some macabre impulse caused him to look at it more closely.  
His foe noticed where he was looking. "So, you've finally noticed...Lina was right, you are a jellyfish." The man drove the sword into the ground, not so far away from Gourry's hand. Gourry made a grab for its hilt, only to feel a weight hit his back and knock the breath out of him. Gourry felt the man's short purple hair brushing against his own. The man's voice, near his ear, said in patient tone, "You know whose blood that is, don't you?" Gourry tensed. It wasn't...  
"You should have seen Lina's face when I plunged it into her heart. It was priceless," the man said with a low laugh. Gourry grabbed for the man's throat, but there was a shimmer...and the man was gone.  
A few seconds later, Gourry heard Zelgadiss's voice over the sounds of battle, yelling out a name; that was quickly followed by a scream of pain that was abruptly cut off in the middle. A thought floated up through the fires of anger in Gourry's mind: He had to get up.  
Pain shot through his body as he struggled to stand up...  
He never did find out what happened next; Lina always woke him up. He was certain that he was lucky in this. 

Lina was lost, alone, in a forest. All the trees were tall and bare of leaves, but Lina could see neither the sun nor starts above her head. Cold light, like moonlight but unlike it, lit the open spaces between the brown-black trees.  
As Lina walked through the eerie silence, she looked up every so often, trying to see the source of the light. Even though she could see the sky through the trees, though, she couldn't see any source for the light. The sky was pitch black, the light somehow illuminating only what was underneath the sky.  
There were other things wrong with the forest. While the trees were completely bare, there was no sign of dead leaves anywhere. The ground was packed, bare dirt, only broken occasionally by roots from the trees.  
Lina strained her hearing, praying to hear something other than her own breathing and her own heartbeat. In a vague way, she thought she could sense a constant hum that lurked just below audibility.  
She walked on, looking and listening for something other than the surreal forest and sounds of herself. Time stretched and warped itself, as nothing changed. The light stayed the same. The ground stayed the same. She _knew_ that her breathing and heartbeat stayed the same, and she could swear that the trees were not changing either.  
Eventually, she couldn't stand the changelessness, and started running. Still, it seemed, nothing changed, but at least it didn't change faster.  
Then, suddenly, it all changed. Lina found herself standing at the edge of what was at best a small clearing and at least a section of less dense forest and watching...  
Gourry, Zelgadiss, and Amelia were fighting a giant slug. Its mottled bulk, the colors of pale dead flesh and rot, stood at least a foot taller than Gourry, and Lina couldn't see its length... Its two horns were as thick as her arm, the ball at each one's tips the size of her fist and each holding an almost human-looking eye with slit pupils and a dull grey iris.  
Lina knew instinctively that it was a mazoku.  
She also knew in her bones that it was a giant slug.  
Lina watched the fight, trying hard to make herself join in. These were her friends fighting...  
...Fighting a giant mazoku slug...  
...And Lina Inverse was _not_ a coward!  
She didn't move, even though she saw that her friends were losing.  
She only looked on in horror as the mazoku got ready to finish them off. Lina could swear that it was grinning as it turned towards Amelia, having separated her from the others, and moved...something. A stream of something that looked like it was flames, moved like water, and was a dead, textureless black color appeared in the air in front of it and arced towards the princess.  
Zelgadiss suddenly appeared in front of Amelia as the rain of black fire fell towards her. Lina could see from where she stood the expression of shock on Amelia's face as he used his demon speed to get in front of her. Lina wondered if Amelia even knew before now that he could move so fast. She could also see the look of determination on Zel's face as he quickly cast a shield spell and shielded Amelia with his own body in case his spell didn't hold up.  
Zel's shield spell held up for part of the attack, but before the attack reached its strongest point the shield flickered and faded, leaving Zelgadiss and Amelia unprotected. There was an ear-splitting masculine scream that cut off abruptly at its loudest point. In macabre counterpoint was an almost as harsh shriek that outlasted it, trailing off as its maker lost the ability to sustain it. Lina could smell the scent of burning...  
When the attack faded from view, Lina could see Zelgadiss, lying on top of Amelia. The attack must have been incredibly hot. The center of the worst-hit spot, right in the middle of his back, was still glowing a dull but hot-looking red, and much of what Lina could see of Zel's skin looked glassy now, no longer the slightly-sparkly matte it had been while he was alive. His hair, too, had melted in the heat and dripped downwards.  
Zel's body had mostly protected Amelia from the attack. However, because Zel had been so nearly complete in his shielding her with his own form, Lina could only see Amelia's right arm. Zel hadn't managed to pull her right arm completely underneath him, and it had gotten burnt horribly -- there was no skin left at all, and Lina could see the bones of Amelia's fingers. Lina felt slightly sick as she saw Amelia's hand twitch slightly.  
The giant slug mazoku must have seen this, too, as it sent another blast of the black fire over the two, this time a much longer one. There was no scream, no cries of agony, accompanying this blast, only the sickening scent of roasting human flesh filling Lina's nostrils. When this blast finally faded, all of Zel's skin glowed that hot dull red, and what had been left of Amelia's arm was now ash. Lina knew, deep down in her stomach, that Amelia hadn't survived that blast.  
The mazoku's horns swung, as if they were scanning...scanning for something, scanning for someone. They swung slowly towards Lina... And stopped.  
Gourry's head turned slowly to look in the direction that the horns pointed in, and Lina could see Gourry's body start to get ready for more fighting, even though it was obvious that he was tired and worn out.  
Then, suddenly, a concentrated burst of black fire came shooting towards Lina's head. Lina watched it, trying desperately to force her body to respond so she could duck, so she could dodge, so she could cast a shield spell, so she could scream... It didn't respond, and the blast kept coming closer.  
When the place was only a few feet away from her, Gourry suddenly entered her sight, standing between her and the blast. The Sword of Light's blade flickered distressingly, and Lina sensed that there was something very wrong about Gourry's stance. She felt somehow that he could barely stand up, but she couldn't say why or how she knew this.  
The blast struck the blade of the Sword of Light. Lina watched as Gourry bravely tried to hold the blast back - he was in no shape, it seemed, to simply deflect it.  
It almost worked.  
Almost.  
The blade flickered wildly, and went out.  
Gourry's sword no longer blocked the blast; the only thing between it and Lina was Gourry. The blast had not had any trouble with the Sword of Light...  
Lina jumped to the side as Gourry collapsed on the leaf-covered ground, the blast just barely missing her. As she watched, blood flowed out of the hole in Gourry's chest. He smiled slightly, his lips moving. Lina thought she could hear him say her name. Then his body went limp.  
The slug mazoku started to crawl towards her. Lina threw a random spell, the first spell that came to her mind, at the mazoku. It hit without any effect. She reached downwards and grabbed the Sword of Light from Gourry's lifeless hand: she needed it more than he did, now. She tried not to think the next natural thought: that he would never need it again.  
"Light come forth!"  
She thanked every god she had ever heard of that this mazoku moved as slowly as a slug, instead of at the usual form-blurring speeds of mazoku. Lina became aware, though, of a hissing sound as the mazoku slowly moved towards her. She looked warily at the mazoku, holding the Sword's blade in a guard position, as it slid over and off of Zelgadiss's corpse.  
Lina was unaware of her eyes narrowing. Zelgadiss's skin, where the mazoku had touched it, no longer looked glassy. It looked rough again, though rougher then it had been before. It looked like...  
Lina's gaze drifted towards the mazoku's trail.  
The slug-shaped mazoku secreted acid.  
She started moving towards the left carefully, and chanting the spell that would activate her amulets, then the spell itself. Even if it might be overkill...  
"Ragna Blade!"  
She made a running leap at the slug mazoku, holding the blade high for an unstoppable downwards blow and channeling the Ragna Blade into the Sword of Light so that it would be even more powerful.  
As the blade hit the mazoku, Lina woke up.  
Gourry was holding her to him, not tightly but not loosely either. She could feel his legs twitch, and he was murmuring something in his sleep that she couldn't make out. She poked him in the ribs until he woke up. 

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

**Assorted notes:**

I like the word 'foreboding'. It turns up in here in some form or other 5 times: 4 times just before the title blurb, and once right here in the notes. 

Yes, I know Gourry seems a whole lot brighter than normal. This is due to two things.  
The first is that he's used to this kind of rural area. There is just something right to giving him a rural/small village boyhood...  
The second is that, unlike Lina, he's too stupid to be worried. Yet. (Ignorance is bliss...) 

I figure Gourry would at least be vaguely aware of some of the bad habits of bandits and some mercenaries (the ones who were really just those bandits who happen work for you, but of course you never called them _bandits_ because that just didn't sound good). Namely, that of (ahem) taking advantage of any females who were unlucky enough to be present. 

No, I don't hate Amelia; she's actually one of my favorite characters in the series. Why do you ask? 

Lina has a phobia about slugs. (Do I really need to say that?)  
There are likely no mazoku who can look like slugs.  
Either that or the entire mazoku race is somewhat stupid.  
The case can be made either way. 

Xelloss might make a few cameos, but he's not actually involved in this story. Why, you ask? That's a secret, I reply. 

Yes, this is dark. I'm well aware of that. Why d'ya think I put that [Dark] tag in the header of the FFML copy and at the start of the summary of the copy on FF.net? Because it looked kawaii there? 

Questions that may eventually be answered:  
* What really happened to Zelgadiss and Amelia?  
* Did they **ahem** make love or just sleep together?  
* How badly will Lina hurt Gourry if -- alright, more like when -- he feels her up in her sleep?  
* What have I been smoking?  
* Where can you get some of it? 

This kept growing on me. I had started it sometime in September of 2000, as far as I can tell -- it's the earliest I have records of mentioning any of this 'fic's images. I had planned to have this chapter done with, about 10 KB or so in size (unwrapped and with tabs instead of spaces for indentation) and out in time for Halloween. Over two years later, and several times when I have found myself unable at all to work on this...I finally manage to release this chapter -- and it's larger and more seriously written than I had originally expected it would be.  
Thanks goes to the FFIRC and the Slayers RP group I was a member of, for putting up with me and my bad moods; my only real prereader for most of this chapter, Death, I wonder why? ; my prereader after Death, Jane Clift, who is a very good friend; those friends of mine online who also took a look at this draft and didn't tell me to drop this, not that my accursed muse'd let me get away with that; and the author who wrote the book that highly influenced this 'fic, I'm sure her ghost wishes it hadn't. 


End file.
